the response has been a mixture of equanimity and stunned silence. In Sweden, by comparison, thousands of people took to the streets when the first far-right MPs were elected that same month.
Wilders (PVV) has agreed to lend his support in parliament to a minority government of conservative Liberals (PVV) and the smaller Christian Democrats (CDA) + in return: freedom to pursue many of his favorite policy projects, including anti-immigrant measures and several openly anti-Muslim initiatives, including a burqa ban and closer monitoring of Islamic schools.
Even though PVV will not take ministerial responsibility, the coalition does depend on his support for its survival and has signed a formal agreement to that extent.
Denmark has had a similar construction in place since 2001, but its right-wing People’s Party is almost moderate compared with Wilders’ Party for Freedom.
The party’s platform calls Islam “mostly a political ideology” and wishes to deny it any of the considerations afforded a religion in the Netherlands.
Wilders: Prophet Mohammed is a “barbarian and a pedophile.”
“They are trying to hide his role, but it is clear that he is part of this government, whether he has a seat in it or not,” says Mariko Peters (GreenLeft).
Wilders sometimes makes the likes of Fox News host Glenn Beck, anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller, and even the most extreme fringes of the Tea Party crowd look like moderates.
Several Dutch media outlets have delved into ideological and financial ties between Wilders and American archconservatives such as David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Jim DeMint.
Just as opponents of the Park51 project have accused its imam, Faisal Abdul Rauf, of radicalism, Wilders has tried to link the people behind a mosque that he opposes, Rotterdam’s Essalam mosque, to Islamic extremism. He suggested in parliamentary questions this January that the main donor for the mosque’s construction, Dubai’s Crown Prince Hamdan bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, could have ties to Afghanistan’s Taliban.
He has called for a “head rag tax” on women wearing headscarves. He favors banning the Quran, wants to close Muslim schools but not equivalent Christian or Jewish ones, wants to force immigrants to sign “assimilation contracts,” and wants to include the “Judeo-Christian character” of the state in the constitution.
Pijpers says that Wilders has more in common with the Tea Party activists in the United States than with any old-style European right-wing party, because he can’t really be classified as either right-wing or left-wing.
His party has also embraced a left-wing populist defense of the Netherlands’ besieged welfare system, and he scores points with his tough stance against crime, which he often links to immigrants.
His outspokenness has made him a hated figure for some Muslims, and he lives under constant police protection. Recently, an Australian imam called for his beheading, the last in a long line of threats. Wilders himself argued in July on the website muslimsdebate.com that he does not hate Muslims — he just opposes Islam and wants Muslims to liberate themselves from its shackles. Strikingly, he seems to have formed his low opinion of Arab and Muslim societies at a young age when he visited both Israel and Egypt and contracted a stomach bug in the latter.
In July, Wilders announced that he was setting up a Geert Wilders International Freedom Alliance aimed at stopping Muslim immigration to the West. He designated the United States as one of five countries that were “ripe” for his alliance, and he may have had this confirmed at the 9/11 rally in New York. Says Golyardi, “He sees that there are people who agree with him all over the world, and he wants to provide an umbrella for them, to found an anti-Islam international.”
Earlier, Wilders had even appealed to mainstream opinion in the United States and Europe by opposing the planned burning of the Quran in Florida, even though he has compared the Quran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
assertions by some Dutch politicians and analysts that once Wilders has been co-opted into the system, as he now is, his sharp edges will be blunted.
The mildness detected in his New York speech was at the time taken as a green light for the other parties to proceed with the talks and eventually reach an agreement with him.